In a midden scatter tumbling far down a slope, three pieces of utilitarian pot that have lain so long separated, on different soil types, that each has weathered to its own color.
Perfect fit.
United
Category Archives: On Integrating Word and Image
At the Base of the Mesas
A nineteenth-century Hispanic homestead, long abandoned in its broadcast midden of rusty metal and purple glass. Axe-cut and adze-hewn beams, windows and doors trimmed with dimension lumber.
It was the first day cool enough, morning only, to scramble and side-hill in the mesa’s shadow. By noon the pale Cretaceous clay was too hot for pleasure.
Newfangled
A chunk of thick, nineteenth-century beer bottle repurposed–right edge retouched–as if it were a flint flake.
Juniper
Lightning-struck.
Burned to the stones, then scoured flush by weather and time.
Weapons, Sand, and Time
A tiny–1.7 cm–obsidian point, probably Ancestral Puebloan.
Flint from a flintlock–Navajo, at a guess. The flint itself is probably from the Brandon flint mines in England, knapped there and imported as a finished product.
Remains of a WWII dummy bomb. The brightly-colored sands and clays of the desert were exploited as targets.
Surfaces
Two weeks ago we walked on dust. But a few days of snow and rain have swollen the bentonite clay in the Morrison Formation into a soft, brickled carpet. Sun and wind will soon turn it to dust again, except where cryptobiotic organisms can anchor it.
In another stratum of the Morrison, the winter wet had brought down a layer of outwash like melted creamsicle: flat as a dance floor, delicate and thin as old wallpaper.
Whose House?
The square-cornered foundation and a couple of scattered sherds say Ancestral Pueblo, but both the vertical orientation and the size of the stones are unusual and impressive. Walls and roof–jacal style, the Southwest version of wattle-and-daub–have long since dissolved into the desert clay.
And another house. I have no idea whose, but the excavator left their claw marks above the doorway.
Dancin’ Feet
Mouse? Packrat?
I vote for a jumping rodent. See how the footprints are clustered? Maybe a kangaroo rat? The soil is clay. It was sloppy mud a couple of weeks ago, now hard as ceramic. This dance should last until the next good rain.
Sky Kitchen
We threaded the wind- and rain-scoured mesa rims among scattered flakes and potsherds of millennia. Here and there, a firepit so old that its ashes were only a faint stain in the dun soil.
The next wind and rain will hide it again. But the metate was in plain sight, the only flat surface among boulders. The last pecking to renew its grinding surface had become dark spots, and the worn surface on the left side was a smooth bowl under the hand.
Ice
In the muddy pool of an elk footprint, frost at work.
WORLD-BUILDING and WILDERNESS: 